The Meadows

A few words about this body of work:

The subject matter is The Meadows section of Northampton, down behind the airport and along the Connecticut River. It is a beautiful and disturbed landscape with an exceptional amount of open sky and wide views (exceptional in our valley-bound landscape, anyway).

I used mostly my wide-angle lenses which neatly capture the close up textures at the same time as capturing the sweeping scale of fields and sky. The lenses are slightly distorting compared to what we actually see with our eyes, lending an ethereal, maybe surreal, quality to the photos.

These pictures are shot with a 10mp Canon digital camera that has been converted to capture infrared images. The process for this conversion, best done by professionals but not unheard of as a DIY project, is to remove a manufacturer-installed filter from in front of the camera’s sensor (a filter that removes IR light so that the camera will capture what we see with the human eye and not all kinds of other weird things). The removed filter is then replaced with a filter that blocks most of the visible light and allows the sensor to capture only the infrared part of the spectrum (which we can’t actually see).

The camera captures as white anything that reflects infrared light, such as grass, and captures as dark anything that absorbs IR rather than reflecting it back to the camera (Pine needles are a good example). Of course there is a lot of in between too. I have the custom white balance on my camera set in such a way that the sensor captures a bit of false color. Hence some of the images in this portfolio show a bit of color instead of just being black and white.